Salesforce.com Announces Second 'Best' Friend: Workday

Salesforce.com promised deep integration with Oracle applications in June. Now it's promising similar ties with HCM and financials vendor Workday.

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How many close strategic partnerships can one company have?

That question emerged on Wednesday as Salesforce.com announced it will deepen its longstanding partnership with Workday. The announcement comes just a few months after Salesforce struck a similar long-term strategic partnership with Workday rival Oracle.

The fruit of the deeper partnership will be application integrations between Salesforce CRM and Workday's human capital management (HCM) and financial management applications. The plans were outlined in a statement with quotes from Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and Workday Co-CEO Aneel Bhusri.

"Aneel and I both agree that salesforce.com and Workday need to unite our clouds," said Benioff in the statement. "Salesforce.com's CRM integrated with Workday HCM and Financial Management is the best of both worlds: the customer applications from salesforce.com combined with HR and Financials from Workday.”

The announcement echoes similar sentiments Benioff and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison exchanged in June when Salesforce and Oracle promised deep integrations between Salesforce.com and Oracle HCM, Financials and Big Data Analytics applications.

"When customers choose cloud applications they expect rapid low-cost implementations; they also expect application integrations to work right out of the box," said Ellison at the time. "That's why Marc and I believe it's important that our two companies work together."

The Oracle partnership led some to wonder whether Salesforce would distance itself from cloud-based apps vendor Workday, but this latest announcement proves that isn't the case.

"By deepening our partnership, we continue to make it easy for enterprises around the world to leverage the cloud to transform their businesses with the proven combination of Salesforce.com and Workday," said Bhusri.

Technical capabilities promised through the Salesforce-Workday partnership include built-in Force.com and Chatter access to Workday data and updates and Workday HCM and Financial Management app access to Salesforce data.

Delivery dates were not announced, but Benioff and Bhursri are slated to offer more detail during a Wednesday afternoon conference call and at the upcoming Dreamforce conference in San Francisco in November.

It's natural for Salesforce.com and Workday to team up. Customers already using Salesforce.com applications instead of on-premises CRM are almost by definition among those most likely to adopt more online apps. And having achieved application data integration, they then need to tie into the Oracle database system. Other Oracle components? Maybe not so much.

'Everything else' is a bit broad. Salesforce lacks HCM and Financial Management. Workday lacks CRM (sales and service). During today's call Workday said it will eventually use Salesforce.com marketing (internally), but it's not clear if there's a fit for Workday and Marketing Cloud for customers. So Salesforce can offer only so much.

This is my second "two-timer" story today after reporting on Teradata's partnerships with SAS rivals Revolution and Fuzzy Logix. Gives new meaning to "coopetition." You may take a partner to the dance, but don't be surprised when you're biggest rival cuts in.

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